Friday, May 04, 2012

Last week George Zimmerman joined an elite circle that includes
Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Martha Stewart, and Dominique
Strauss-Kahn-media figures who owe their freedom to electronic
monitoring. For the rich and famous (as well as those who can raise
$200,000 online) electronic monitoring, or more precisely, house arrest
with an ankle bracelet means liberation from the vagaries of life with
the ordinary folk behind bars. First used in U.S. courts in 1983
electronic monitoring is currently going viral in the criminal justice
system. While in the early days, radio frequency technology dominated,
most current systems are GPS-based, allowing near real time tracking.

Originally what practitioners often call “EM” applied primarily to
people guilty of petty crimes or those` with sex offenses. But today
prison overcrowding and state budget crises have made electronic
monitoring an alternative of choice. On a normal day some 200,000
people wake up with a black plastic box strapped to their leg and the
number is growing. In the past week alone, San Francisco County
announced plans to triple the number of people on EM while legislators
in Louisiana, which has the nation’s highest per capita incarceration
rate, considered initiatives to put legions of people onto the streets
using the electronic tether.

On one level all this EM is a good thing. For more than three
decades we’ve been locking people up at a furious rate. Our prison and
jail population has quintupled since 1980, now standing around 2.3
million. Electronic monitoring does offer opportunities for people other
than the rich and famous to avoid being behind bars. Currently, the
most common application of electronic monitoring is pre-trial release.
Every day individuals awaiting judgment on relatively minor offenses go
about their daily business on an ankle bracelet as a condition of bail.
Cook County in Illinois has already run 250,000 people through
electronic monitoring regimes, 85% of them pre-trial. This is a step in
the right direction-trying to ensure that a minor brush with the law
doesn’t cost a person their job, their housing, or access to medical
treatment and education. But at the same time, there are concerns about
how the use of this technology will evolve. It all gets a little more
complicated when we move beyond the Zimmermans and other lesser lights
awaiting trial.

At the root of the complexity is the reality that electronic
monitoring is not only a policy device, but an industry. Not
surprisingly the biggest force in the world of EM is also one of the
giants of the private prisons sector, the GEO Group. This Florida-based
firm pulled in earnings of just over $1.6 billion in 2011. Early last
year GEO took over the EM sector’s largest player, BI Incorporated of
Colorado. BI is both a producer of the devices and a provider of backup
services, including direct monitoring of individuals on ankle bracelets
through a network of community-based offices. BI controls some 30% of
the U.S. EM market.

GEO’s investment in BI dovetails neatly with the company’s most
rapidly expanding market niche: immigration detention. While private
providers only hold 8% of prison beds nationwide, in immigration the
figure is 49%. The advent of harsher immigration laws and the
increasing implementation of Secure Communities promises even bigger
profits for private sector liberty deprivers. For those captured by the
immigration dragnet but not put behind bars, BI has the perfect
solution- intensive supervision. In a $372 million contract signed with
ICE in 2009, BI agreed to “intensively supervise” 27,000 people awaiting
litigation for deportation or political asylum. For most of these
27,000 that intensive supervision will include a BI ankle bracelet.

The introduction of this technology into the immigration sphere
raises questions of who’s next. If the GEO Group and other major
players in the electronic monitoring sector such as Omnilink, iSecure
Trac, Secure Alert, and Pro Tech are to maintain their bottom lines,
they need to expand their revenue either by tethering more ankles,
lobbying for longer terms for those who are under EM, or increasing
service charges.

The obvious first target is growing the use of GPS monitoring as a
condition of parole or probation. Currently, there are nearly five
million people in the U.S. under some form of post-conviction
supervision. Less than 50,000 are on electronic monitoring. While there
is little evidence that EM reduces recidivism, expect the private
providers, led by BI, to use an army of lobbyists to pitch their
product with a heavy dose of the gospel of ensuring public safety and
the need for tighter restrictions for those on GPS systems.

A second untapped market niche is school pupils In Texas a number of
high schools with primarily African American and Latino student bodies
are placing pupils with records of excessive truancy on ankle bracelets.
In Dallas’ Bryan Adams High School, local EM provider iISecureTrac
kicked in $26,000 to fund a pilot program. The principal was a former
employee of the Bureau of Prisons.

In terms of service charges, many existing EM programs have already
initiated user fees on bracelet wearers of $5 to $15 a day plus startup
charges which run as high as $200. Denver even has a website where
people can pay their EM user fees online. Such miniscule tariffs don’t
pose a problem for the Martha Stewarts and Paris Hiltons of the EM
realm, but for the generally impoverished population that ends up in
jail relatively small amounts can break the bank.

So while EM has brought relief to George Zimmerman and other perhaps
more deserving folk, the real question is: where is this technology
heading? Here are two voices that offer some answers. John Hastings
III, President of Secure Alert, put forward this summary of his firm’s
direction:

“We will continue to focus our energies and efforts in delivering
profitable revenue growth, while supporting customer-specific public
safety initiatives through the innovation and deployment of our
best-in-class, intervention and real-time monitoring technologies and
services.”

Slate reporter William Saletan offered a slightly different take:

“As GPS gets cheaper, politicians will be tempted to order it not
just for people who would otherwise be jailed, but for those who
wouldn’t.”

No matter which of these voices you’re listening to, if your history
includes mental health problems, receiving state assistance, seriously
overdue student loan repayments or getting caught smoking in the high
school bathroom-watch your ankle.

James Kilgore is a Research Scholar at the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois. He is the author of three novels, We Are All Zimbabweans Now,
Freedom Never Rests and Prudence Couldn’t Swim, all written during his
six and a half years of incarceration. He also spent a year on an
electronic monitor. He can be reached at waazn1@gmail.com

Break the Chains.info

is a news and discussion forum for supporters of political prisoners, prisoners of war, politicized social prisoners, and victims of police and state intimidation.

This blog is organized and updated autonomously of the disbanded Break the Chains Prisoner Support Network formerly based in Eugene, Oregon. While this online project shares several of the same concerns as the old Break the Chains collective, no formal organization exists behind the current web presence.

"I will never surrender my pride and dignity nor allow the system to 'cut my tongue' and I will always, without fear, speak out against these war crimes and crimes against humanity, no matter if I spend the rest of my life in a prison cage, and draw my last breath of air laying down in this steel bed surrounded by razor-wire fences and cages, and its prison policies that are designed to destroy one's humanity…."